Our sunrise tour lacked information and drama, so I insisted we visit the ancient burning ghat after dark for our last night in Varanasi.

Luke and I left behind the crowds watching bell ringing and incense ceremonies to walk along a dingy, dark underpass.

Groups of men with staring eyes appeared from the shadows, signalling our arrival. I noticed a family about to say their final goodbye to a relative.

‘Don’t take pictures,’ the men surrounding us whispered.

The ancient crematorium took me back in time; looking around I saw we were the only tourists.

I spun on my heels, pulling Luke to come back, when a young man came over. ‘I work at the hospice behind the burning ghat’ he said. Already he’d given us more information than we’d learnt that morning.

‘There’s a hospice behind a 3500-year-old crematorium?’ I asked.

I realised people make their final journey here to live out the rest of their days breathing in the smoky sandalwood air.

The now enthusiastic young man said he ‘didn’t want any money’, which in India is code for wanting money, but it reassured us none-the-less.

‘It’s ok if you go to the ceremony, you are curious to learn,’ he said.

The body, draped in red, a woman, was surrounded by all male relatives.

Women stay at home because, from what I can gather, one woman threw herself on her husband’s pyre. This may be a romantic Indian tale, but it made me the only (living) woman at the ghats that night.

The grieving family didn’t give us a second glance – tourists, at a funeral.

We were shown the medieval scales used to weigh the exact amount of wood needed to burn a human.

‘Women’s hip bones don’t fully burn so they are thrown to the water.’ he said.

I imagine a river full of female pelvises as I watch a body burn on a large grill.

There were five fires burning – one for each caste – and a separate area for government officials.

‘All fires are lit from embers which have been burning for three and a half millennia.’

Close to the original, ancient fire, our guide said a prayer for us and smudged the black, gritty ashes onto our foreheads.

We couldn’t have been any closer to the sacred flames unless we were being burned ourselves.